But it's precisely this permanence, the fact that seed multiplies. Every seed can
give rise to ten or twenty a hundred and the family of millets are called millets
and they're my favorite crops. We call them the forgotten foods and I always
say with my colleagues in Navdanya, the movement for seed saving I started 30
years ago. And that's another reason it's good to be back at the expo, because it's
like a combination of celebration of all of us who have been doing this work over
decades, but to the seed that has been working over millennia. Now each little
seed of the millets and they're tiny seeds. It's the millet family has its roots in
the word million in the Latin, million thousands. One seed, thousands of seeds.
How can you ever have scarcity when one can become a thousand? So to create
scarcity, you've to turn one into a zero.
And all the efforts of an industry cannot be more brilliant than the seed
itself is. It cannot do more breeding than the farmers are doing. Our farmers
took one wild grass called Oryza sativa in India, turned it into 200 thousand
varieties, (basmati), the black rice, the purple rice, the red rice, the rice for lactating
mothers, the rice for babies, the rice that can tolerate floods and salt, which
we've saved in our seed banks in Orissa and distributed those seeds after the
Cyclones, after the Hurricanes, after the tsunamis, truckloads of seeds.
Every attempt of industry has been to rob seed of its power to multiply, its
power to renew, its power to be diverse, because anything that evolves evolves
into diversity. Everything that is controlled
externally is based on uniformity.
So diversity, in fact, in nature and society is a reflection of the freedom
of the different beings in that ecosystem and uniformity is a reflection
of external control.
And that external control merges very very quickly into such fear that
anything that is free and alive on its own terms becomes a threat. And I see so
much of what we see wrong in our times as responses of people who are afraid,
who are afraid of a nature that is independent, of a seed that
self-organizes, of seed that multiplies, of farmers that have seeds in their
hands, of people who have intelligence and can make their decisions. So every
step of violence we witness, whether it be violence against the seed, or it be
violence in society, and each of us in our societies can tell stories by the
day. They just killed a brilliant journalist in India because she was an
independent. Right. That was a crime. She was free. So I see today's fear as a fear
of diversity, a fear of life, and a fear of self-organization. And that fear then
comes expressed in wiping out diversity which is why, again, salutations to the
Heirloom Expo, for having all of these exhibitions to help us remember.
The fear of life is to constantly try and exterminate life. Which is why when
we say let the seed be exhaustless what Monsanto does and ( )
language it bought out, what they do is create a Terminator technology to make
seeds sterile. I started seed-saving 30 years ago because that's where the old
chemical industry, and we're going to have a whole session after this one
on that poison industry, but that industry said you're not making enough
money, and we've got to take ownership of the seed in order to generate the profit.
So this they were seeking in '87 royalties from every seed that a farmer
buys anywhere. And the royalties for them were defined through genetic engineering.
I always remind people GMOs did not come to us because someone thought they were
feeding the world. Just like in the Green Revolution. The Green Revolution was not
because of feeding, they just wanted to introduce chemicals into farming that
time they gave the spin of the Green Revolution. And now it's a spin of GMOs
feed the world and both have created hunger. They haven't
solved the problem of nutrition. They've created hunger because they've created
scarcity. They've created scarcity because, you
know, that, those pumpkins, those squashes were all seeds, and inside them is
seed for the next generation. But along the way, we also get food. So can you see
the generosity of seed? That seed goes to seed, which is the cycle of permanence,
but also is so creative it says, "and, I will not just renew myself for my next
generation, I'm going to give you food along the way. Food for me is a by-
product of the seed." And we forget that, we very often forget that, which is why so
much fake food is overtaking our lives, because we forget that real food begins
in seed and must go back to seed.
The first
big threat the threat to diversity is expressed in fact that not only have we
taken the diversity in each species here in the squashes, or the rices, or
in the wild plant called teosinte, which gave rise to the thousands of corn
varieties. If Mexico even today does not allow GMO corn because the people come
out and say we are corn, we are the culture of corn.
We cannot be separated from our corn. And that is the reason even today the
culture of corn blesses Mexico. There've been attempts by Monsanto again and
again. Last time it was trying to take over six million acres. And they got a
presidential decree and the people got it stopped, both through building movements
as well as through legal actions. Which also reminds me of the fact that, you know, we
often we ourselves as citizens seeking freedom reduce ourselves to
monocultures. You know? We think, oh I'll just be an anti-GM activist, I'll just
be a pesticide activist, I'll just be a good food activist. No, no, no, all of this
is one piece because the earth is interconnected in a web of life. And in
an interconnected world, we can't divide things up and say, "I'll only look at
this," because the divisions cripple us. And seeing the connections is what
gives us power, seeing the connections amongst each other which is
nothing but solidarity, and seeing the connections between us in nature and
seeing the connections in nature. So we've eaten 12,000 varieties, no, sorry,
12,000 species of plants, now we are trading in 12, and what's spreading is four
that are genetic modified: corn, canola, soya, cotton. We've written about this
in the manifest to be brought out called the law of the seed, about which
we talk much more tomorrow in the seed freedom session, which my colleague
Richie will be moderating. Not only have we shrunk the base of our seed diversity,
and our plant diversity, with it we changed the base of our diets, and what's
being grown now it's not even being grown for food. 90% of corn and soya is
grown for biofuel and animal feed. It's not a food system.
It's make money at any cost system. I call it the money machine. It's a war
against renewal. I mentioned the Terminator technology. But hybrids, too,
were designed to not breed true, so farmers would have to come to the market every
year. And even the issue of patenting of seed is a war against the renewal of the
seed, because a patent is an exclusive right granted to a patent holder to
prevent anyone else from making, using, selling, distributing. But when a
Monsanto takes a patent on seed and that's all they're seeking,
that's all this seeking. And I actually feel so grateful that we were
able in India to stop them from having patents on seed. There is no law
in this country on these issues, they just get patents. In India, we have
a law, article 3G of our patent law, which does not allow Monsanto to have patents.
Because if they have a patent,
there are three crimes against the Earth and farmers and people. The first crime is
they take this diversity and richness and reduce it to monoculture because
they don't have the brilliance to deal with diversity. Diversity needs brilliance,
monocultures needs dumbness. Second, it's an attack on the farmers right to
save seeds and exchange seeds, which is the basis of seed freedom. But it's an attack
on the freedom of the seed itself, because the seed needs the loving care of a grower, a
gardener, a farmer, to go to the next generation. And that is why, in seed
there's a joint creativity. I call it the core creativity between humans and the
plants. You can't have seed, I mean, you can have forest seeds, and you can have, but crop seeds,
crop seeds need cultivation to get to the next generation and to multiply and
flourish. So it is a war against abundance, because there's a fear of
abundance in the hands of people.
Everything in the so-called economy is how do you make people dependent on
buying what they need, not having what they need, not growing what they need?
And, the growing issue is precisely where now it's starting to get recognized and
we've had to learn this in Navdanya through, through our work on saving
seeds. A lot of people will come to Navdanya because a) the seeds give us food
that's tasty. The industrial crops are tasteless, nutritionally empty, loaded
with toxics. So they don't have the positive values of what food should be,
but they have all the negative values of what food should not be. The
malnutrition that's been created begins in the seed and the way we grow it. The
organic farming increases nutrition because it increases the nutrition to
the soil. Organic farming, for me, is nothing more than feeding the soil. And
feeding the soil organisms. And seeds are not just the result of our labour, the
earthworms, and the Mycorrhiza, they have done their bit. The pollinator has contributed
one third of all the food we have. You add all that, every seed holds those
creativities and contributions. All the past evolution, all of the future.
I have a lot of debates with the corporations, and they always say, "Oh yeah, we
recognize farmers have done their bit." And I say, "No, no, no, we are not talking
about the past only, we are talking about the future." And it's only seeds in the
hands of people, in the hands of caring farmers and gardeners, which will be the
future. The other is annihilating the future.
It's annihilating the future, because 75% of this planet's destruction is
because of seeds that came from greed for greed, not for nourishing life, and
allowing life to continue in abundance.
The abundance includes the nutrition in the food. In organic food, there's a
106% more copper, 61% more magnesium, 64% more zinc, 120% more chromium,
and 72% of all trace elements. And when I started saving seeds, all I wanted
to do was save seeds. We didn't realize then it would give us more food. Our work is
showing, and we have a report and this should be available on the Navdanya
website, we said, we are not going to measure yield. What's the point of measuring
the yield of nutritionally empty stuff?
We should measure nutrition! So we measure nutrition.
(applause)